[Excerpt of news article by Jamil Ragland, CT News Junkie, July 23, 2024]
A new report shows that despite advances in the rights that LGBTQIA+ residents in Greater Hartford enjoy, they still face greater challenges than their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts in areas ranging from financial stability to housing insecurity.
The report, titled LGBTQIA+ Resident Wellbeing in Greater Hartford, was published by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving in collaboration with DataHaven. The document gathers information from several sources, including the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, DataHaven’s Community Wellbeing Survey, and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities’ annual discrimination data. The Hartford Foundation also facilitated conversation during which they gathered qualitative data. It is thought to be the first comprehensive survey on the condition of LGBTQIA+ residents in Greater Hartford.
“The combination of qualitative and quantitative data in this report highlights a rich story of a resilient and passionate community of LGBTQIA+ people and resources in Greater Hartford,” said Shannon Carter, a DataHaven Research Associate and lead author of the study. “As indicated by the data, this community has unique barriers to housing, healthcare, and employment due to structural stigma and interpersonal bias. This is evident in the disparities in outcomes on these measures.”
The report covers three broad areas: financial security, health and healthcare, and social conditions. In all three areas, the report shows that LGBTQIA+ residents in Greater Hartford lag behind their heterosexual and cisgender neighbors. LGBTQIA+ adults have a harder time paying for their basic needs and face greater instances of housing insecurity.
The report also shows that different members within the LGBTQIA+ community face greater challenges than others. Of the people who identify as either LGBT or queer, 15% report facing food insecurity. That number jumps to nearly one fourth of all people who identify as transgender. 19% of queer-identified people in the survey reported missing needed medical care within the last year; that number more than doubles to 39% for transgender individuals.
Connecticut has a reputation for being a leader in protecting LGBTQIA+ rights. It was the second state in the nation to pass a civil union law which gave LGBTQIA+ couples the same rights as marriage in 2005, after Vermont. It was also the second state to make gay marriage legal in 2008, behind neighboring Massachusetts. In 2021, the state passed the Connecticut Parentage Act to extend protections for parents and children to same-sex families.
Yet the disparities revealed in the LGBTQIA+ Resident Wellbeing survey underscores how even a robust set of legal protections can fail to translate into the lived experiences of individuals who have typically been marginalized. The report shows that LGBTQIA+ residents are far more likely to experience discrimination at the hands of healthcare workers, police and employers than heterosexual and cisgender residents, with transgender people receiving the most discrimination.
“There’s still a lot of room for improvement,” Carter said in a phone interview. “And I think some of that is discussed in the qualitative section about Connecticut’s national role, in that Connecticut has been a leader compared to the rest of the states, but that’s not necessarily the ceiling of how good the protections can be.”
Carter believes that while policy and law are important, the most critical thing necessary to bridge the gap between legal frameworks and lived experience is for leaders to hear about the lives of LGBTQIA+ people and what they experience.
“I think that the main thing that would go the farthest is for the people that are in positions of power, whether that’s grant making or policy making, to be listening to queer people from the community,” they said. “Population level data is great to understand kind of the the breadth of a situation. But there are so many queer community members that are interacting with people in power and telling them the same stories that are played out in this data. I think it would go a really long way for that to be taken at face value rather than to be endlessly validated.”
